Notational analysis

In professional sports, notational analysis is the study of movement patterns, strategy and tactics in team sports. Successful patterns of play can be identified and used in subsequent matches. Notational analysis has a history in dance and music notation. Notational analysis is a way that critical events in a performance can be quantified in a consistent and reliable manner.

In notational analysis, no change in performance of any kind will take place without feedback. The role of feedback is central in the performance improvement process, and by inference, so is the need for accuracy and precision of such feedback. The provision of this accurate and precise feedback can only be facilitated if performance and practice is subjected to a vigorous process of analysis.

Augmented feedback has traditionally been provided by subjective observations, made during performance by the coaches, in the belief that they can accurately report on the critical elements of performance without any observation aids. Several studies not only contradict this belief, but also suggest that the recall abilities of experienced coaches are little better than those of novices, and that even with observational training, coaches' recall abilities improved only slightly. Furthermore, research in applied psychology has suggested that these recall abilities are also influenced by factors that include the observer's motives and beliefs. The coach is not a passive perceiver of information, and as such his or her perception of events is selective and constructive, not simply a copying process. This importance of feedback to performance improvement, and the limitations of coaches' recall abilities alluded to above, implies a requirement for objective data upon which to base augmented feedback, and the main methods of "objectifying" this data involve the use of video / notational analysis (Hughes and Franks, 1997 p. 11).

Coaches have been aware, consciously or unconsciously, of these needs for accuracy of feedback and have been using simple data gathering systems for decades. More recently, sports scientists have been using notational analysis systems to answer fundamental questions about game play and performance in sport. An early work, over some decades, on analysis of soccer was picked up by the then Director of Coaching at the Football Association, and this had a profound effect on the patterns of play in British football – the adoption of the 'long ball' game. Generally, the first publications in Britain of the research process by notational analysis of sport were in the mid-1970s, so as a discipline it is one of the more recent to be embraced by sports science. The publication of a number of notation systems in racket sports provided a fund of ideas used by other analysts. Because of the growth and development of sports science as an academic discipline, a number of scientists began using and extending the simple hand notation techniques that had served for decades. This also coincided with the introduction of personal computers, which transformed all aspects of data gathering in sports science. Currently hand and computerised notation systems are both used to equal extents by working analysts, although the use of computer databases to collate hand notated data post-event makes the analyses much more powerful.

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